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Warping onto the battlefield
After selecting a campaign, building your roster, customising your units and readying for a drop, the menu will fade away and you'll fade into a first person view of the Exobay. There you'll go through a preflight check inside your Exo, powering up your batteries, igniting your engines, loading your weapons and booting your radar. When the sequence is complete you are warped down to the planets surface, and must immediately contend with clearing out a landing zone.
The plan here is for this to feel something like a mash between the iconic Mechwarrior boot sequence, and some of level intros from the Titanfall series. It's meant to be both a quick warm up with controls, and an eff-yeah moment to kick off a campaign.
The drop sequence isn't something I'd planned to have in the game, but after testing a couple campaign playthroughs I found that diving straight into the strategic layer feels... a bit bland, so this is the first step into adding some immersive spice into the game.
There's still a ton of work that needs to be done here. The Exobay is literally just grey blocks, there's no reaction from the Exo upon ground impact (yes it needs to be a 3 point landing), the player needs to drop into a bunch of easily squashable enemies, etc etc etc. Getting the core functionality in has been pretty easy and everything clips into the existing modular structures of the game, so it's been an absolute pleasure working on this new feature.
One upside of working on the drop sequence is that it laid the groundwork for building out a more extensive framework of first person animations, something I'd always wanted to do in Interloper, but couldn't implement due to a less clean coding system. So I spent about 20 minutes today putting those in, and now, when you Reload, use a Utility, or use Torso Twist, you'll have first person animations to match.
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Finally, I spent a bit of time this past two weeks looking over my timelines, and I think Exoloper might be good for launch come mid this year. Not quite the six month timeline I'd envisaged, but definitely much quicker than any of my other options. More to come on this later of course.